Something I Usually Hate...

First up, before I get to the real post--thank you immensely for the support and suggestions last time! I will post more info on the CD (pretty much finished!) soon.

This is a post I wrote a while back and just hadn't published it, so here you go....

There is one thing (many things) that I don't like about myself: how I hate to be wrong. I will argue a point for hours if I think I am right. My parents always told me I should be an attorney (ha) while at the same time encouraging me to be a writer (!). Ironically, my mother told me not to be a teacher or a nurse because my future was open to so much more than that, as opposed to hers...and I was a teacher and now am an advanced practice nurse. Whoops. But I digress.

I hate to be wrong. I need to be right. It's a personal flaw, one of which I am well aware.

But I am wrong.

For years I have hurt.
So deeply, pain I didn't even know existed.
I have said these words many times but they are just so true.

I have cried, I have avoided, I have hid, I have seethed, I have cried some more. I have watched what I perceived to be the fertile world going on around me and I have felt isolated. I have felt lost. I have felt purposeless and then felt utterly crappy for feeling that way. I have received invitations to baby showers and birth announcements and ignored them. I have been rude. I have been unavailable. I have been unforgiving. I have blamed. I have fumed. I have cried on my couch. I have collapsed on the floor. I have been scraped off the floor.

I have been all of those things and many, many more because of infertility. I have spent over five years feeling an undercurrent of sadness that has threatened to wash me right away.

And now, I am wrong.

Wrong because I had been told that one day I would not hurt so much anymore, maybe not at all. That one day the genetic connection I fought so hard so get would simply not matter, it would simply fade into the background.

I would always nod politely on the outside and seethe on the inside. Sometimes I would cry, but mostly I would think to myself: YOU are wrong. YOU do not know. YOU are not me.
And now, I am wrong. I was wrong.
The babies, from the second I laid eyes on them--those babies became real to me in a way I did not know could exist. They are mine and I am theirs. No, I do not--will not--ever own them. But I will be privileged to parent them, to love them, to nurture them, to mother them.

And I read about former infertiles who had ART success saying the scars still run so deep but right now, I am not hurting. I am free from that pain. I am not even noticing the scars.
I am in shock and disbelief about this but why would I intentionally hold onto any pain if it isn't there?
Poof.
It's gone.
Those babies, my babies, are there and waiting and they need me, the whole me, complete, not still suffering me.

And so many times I want to shout this from the rooftops, to others still deep in the trenches, fighting so hard to have the genetic connection, and then I realize, I could say it one million times and they would think: no, YOU are wrong. And that's OK. Because no one else is me, and our stories are all unique.

It doesn't happen often, when I freely admit I was wrong. But I can't imagine a better thing about which to be wrong.